The Daily Telegraph - Features
Everyday scenes made remarkable
Franki Raffles
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
★★★★☆
In the 10 years leading up to her untimely death in childbirth in 1994, aged 39, Edinburgh-based photographer Franki Raffles took more than 40,000 pictures, many of women at work. Art galleries are frequently putting on “forgotten female artist” shows, less so forgotten feminist photographers. Thanks to a few enthusiastic curators, this remarkable show takes us back to the 1980s and early 1990s, during which Raffles worked with women’s organisations, trades unions and charities such as Women’s Aid, documenting the working lives of women both in the UK and abroad. Raffles made adventurous trips to the Soviet Union, China, India, Israel and elsewhere, her camera always trained on what ordinary working women were doing to make a living.
Grounded in Left-wing feminism, Raffles turned her lens on the workplace and daily life. Baltic’s exhibition presents Raffles’s brief, intense career in large, wall-filling groups of images arranged chronologically, each staging a particular series or project. In Britain, we find ourselves in schools and hospitals, laundries and food processing, mail sorting, administration. There’s a lot of cleaning, mopping floors and dusting offices. In Russia, we see female farmworkers toiling in fields, or factory workers busy making dresses and shoes. An early series documents the run-down, threadbare fishing communities of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides.
More committed than the usual photojournalist, and never a self-conscious “art” photographer, Raffles frames these everyday scenes with a matter-of-fact lack of staging, avoiding exaggerated composition, and she isn’t much interested in making individual character studies or portraits. Her eye is on her subjects’ situation, the facts of what women have to get
on with to make a living. These were images made as a form of activism, for circulation in publication or for shows toured to un-arty community venues, and an important part of Raffles’s approach included the recording of women’s own words, interview material that would appear as caption texts alongside. That element is downplayed here, excluded from the images on the walls, while archive documents in nearby vitrines – publications, magazines, pamphlets, letters – tell the stories of these projects, along with a large table of reading matter that occupies the centre of the main gallery.
There’s an inadvertent sense of nostalgia in these jumps back to the years of Thatcher’s Britain – the perms and push-button phones, the smoking in the workplace, the pubs and bingo halls. It’s not a trivial sense, though; while working people’s lives weren’t easy during the 1980s, it’s hard not to miss the strong sense of community in these images. One wonders what Raffles would have made of today’s housing crisis, impossible childcare costs and the fraying sense of local (and national) community. On another floor is a show by young photographer Joanne Coates. In vivid contrast to Raffles, Coates’s portraits and audio stories of young women living in rural Yorkshire and the Orkneys, pictured alone against stark and humid landscapes, seem almost romantic at first glance. But they’re spiked with their subjects’ anxieties about housing, uncertain work and dwindling public services. The contrast is the bleak sense of isolation and political paralysis. Four decades on from Raffles’s activism, where have we got to?
Until March 2025; baltic.art